William Blake, the secularisation of religious categories, and the history of imagination seminar

This was a seminar hosted by the Englightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture research unit, and the English and Theatre Studies Program

15 August 2018

The most important of the recent accounts of Blake's relation to London's radical religious subcultures are historical studies, designed to recover the immediate contexts within which Blake was working. They are therefore not primarily interested in the poet's rereading of these contexts. This paper reverses their emphases, by focusing on Blake's rereading of his sources. In brief summary, by dispatching the transcendental God and eternal 'reality' that anchor Swedenborgian and Moravian discourses, Blake is able to reorder their elements into a poetic / analytic system, based on poiesis rather than representation. This enables him to describe heaven as a 'fictitious entity', and the actual world as a contingent product formed in the action and reaction of ‘ungrounded’ forces and elements.

Rather than leaving us on the margins of history, this rereading of religious discourses and the redescription of the actual world that it enables, take us to the modern - the volatile urban/commercial milieu of London in the late-18th and early-19th century, which Blake hoped his poetic-prophecies would transform. In so doing it traces, amidst the ruins of religious and secular eschatologies, the emergence of modern discourses of creativity.

Image: Plate 21 from William Blake's "For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise" entitled "To the Accuser Who Is the God of This World."

William Blake

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Professor Peter Otto

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